National Maritime Museum

Yesterday, for our outing we went to Greenwich and visited the National Maritime Museum. Unfortunately, we don't really have any pictures of the actual museum because our family photographer (Jason) is starting to get sick and wasn't really feeling like taking pictures. Plus, for reasons I don't fully get, you can't take any pictures in just about any museum in London. Now, there might be a few places where you can but it seems like they all have signs that say no photography and the guards are not shy about enforcing it. So I will just have to tell you about it.

It's a museum all about the sea and Britain's presence on it. There was a bit about the ocean itself, a lot about the British navy including some uniforms and some about immigration to the Americas with what the crossing was like. There was a section on Atlantic trade. On such a topic, a lot of the room was about slavery. After reading the book based in Nigeria, I was all about the section on the slave uprisings and emancipation. I was thinking, go slaves! There was a big room with sea art which was Jason's favorite place, he loves paintings of ships. Then a huge room about Admiral Nelson. They had the coat he was wearing when he was shot at the Battle of Trafalgar (side note, the reason Trafalgar Square is named what it is, I didn't know when I went there) as well as a few other clothes of his and describing the battle, what the navy was like then, and the aftermath of his death. Apparently, he was a pretty popular guy.

Our little social butterfly.

This was all pretty interesting although we moved through it pretty quickly because we were all kind of tired. The best part, by far was when we rested on a big open area near the cafe. It was on the second floor and had some glass cases with stuff on the sides but mostly it was all open. We decided to let Anna out and just crawl around. She loved it. At first I would kind of follow her around. She crawled over to a group of moms with little babies (the oldest was 4 months) to say hello. Then we thought we would just let her go and see how far away she would go (the place was pretty empty). As she was going, she would turn back and see that we hadn't moved and we would wave at her and she would keep going. She ended up going over to this lady and when she stooped down to say hello, Anna stood up using her knee for support. At this point, I joined them. The lady was very friendly (saying she would like to have one like her as a grandchild, who wouldn't?) and Anna loved her. Then she noticed another little girl walking with her mom and wanted to go say hi. I went with her this time and they had fun checking each other out and Anna was grabbing for her nose. It was very cute. I keep hearing about stranger anxiety but I don't think Anna has it. She pretty much likes everybody.